Lilbits 348: More inclusive emoji

2 weeks ago

Another year, another set of cartoonish characters that we can use in lieu of words to convey meaning while sending text messages.
The Unicode Consortium has approved 59 distinct new emoji… or a total of 230 when you account for skin tone and gender variations.
Among other things, Emoji 12 lets you show two people holding hands in a whole bunch of different skin tone and gender combinations, display images that indicate a deaf person or a person or an ear with a hearing aid, a man or woman in a wheelchair or with a probing cane.
There are also new symbols for food, animals, and objects.
credit: Emojipedia
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
Unicode Emoji 12.0 — final for 2019 [The Unicode Blog]Other new additions include yawning face, finger pinching hand, guide dog, service dog, waffle, manual or motorized wheelchair, ice cube, garlic, onion, falafel, butter, oyster, skunk, and sloth.
HP’s Next-gen VR Headset [Road to VR]HP has a new higher-res Windows Mixed Reality Headset on the way, with 2160 x 2160px per eye, updated design for better comfort, a focus on professional customers (although anyone will be able to buy it).
1.3-litre Mini-PC for Intel Hexa-Core processors of the 8th generation [Shuttle]Shuttle DH370 compact computer with a new chassis design and support for 8th-gen Intel “Coffee Lake” processors (up to 65 watts.
Homebrew 2.0.0 [bew.sh]Homebrew is a package manager for installing open source software on a Mac…. and also now on Linux and Windows 10 computers (if you enable Windows Subsystem for Linux). Homebrew 2.0 was released over the weekend.
The Great Huawei Disconnect [Gizmodo]Huawei makes excellent hardware. But the company’s relationship to the Chinese government has US regulators worried & that complicates the issue of whether it’s a good idea to buy Huawei phones or laptops. Gizmodo raises good questions (has few answers).
A small notebook for a system administrator [habr]This is a ridiculously well thought-out article about a computer that doesn’t actually exist — a 9.5″ laptop with a ton of I/O ports, status indicators, and other features designed specifically for IT admins — it’d be called the “adminbook.”

You can keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook.